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Jean-François Lyotard - Libidinal Economy

One of Lyotard's most important works, Libidinal Economy concludes a line of thought which develops out of the work of de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Klossowski, Irigaray and Cixous. Libidinal Economy is regarded as the most important response to the philosophies of desire, as expounded by thinkers such as de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. It is a major work not only of philosophy, but of sexual politics, semiotics and literary theory, that signals the passage to postmodern philosophy.

An important work by the late, missed and brilliant Jean-François Lyotard. An effective response to Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus", Lyotard almost succeeds in showing the libidinal drives underlying not only the economy but a critique of Marxism too. Here while seemingly accepting Freud's idea of the libido, Lyotard shows how much more complex and satisfying his take of society is compared to the cumbersome and unsuccessful try by Deleuze and Guattari to combine Marx and Freud. Lyotard uses ideas from Bataille to stress the organic development of man and society in contrast to the mechanistic structures of "Anti-Oedipus" which is reminiscent of most of the French rationalist school who want to reduce everything to equations of either bodies without organs, or a formula by Descartes.